It Was All Directed From the Top

More evidence that the entire notion of "bad apples" improvising the torture techniques at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere is a massive, self-interested lie by Cheney and Bush. Money quote from today's NYT:

Waterboarding
might be an excruciating procedure with deep roots in the history of
torture, but for the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services, recordkeeping
for each session of near-drowning was critical. “In order to best
inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important
that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented,”
said medical guidelines prepared for the interrogators in December 2004.

The
required records, the medical supervisors said, included “how long each
application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used
in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the
water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx
was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break
between applications, and how the subject looked between each
treatment.”

When the doctors gauged what a drenching in a cold
cell might do to a prisoner, they did their research, consulting a
textbook entitled “Wilderness Medicine,” in particular Chapter 6 on
“accidental hypothermia,” as well as a Canadian government pamphlet,
“Survival in Cold Waters,” according to footnotes.

Yes, they studied very carefully how far to freeze a human being to avoid killing him. So when we hear about Navy Seals using rectal thermometers to determine how far they could go in freezing prisoners in iced baths (if you recall this as a Gestapo technique, you are not wrong), we know they were acting on guidance from the White House.

The real war criminals are in the political elite. And the same political and media elite is intent on protecting their own. Even now.